That didn’t take long.
Just hours after Bernie Sanders agreed to endorse his primary opponent, a top adviser to Hillary Clinton has confirmed that her avowed opposition to the TransPacific Partnership agreement is just meaningless campaign rhetoric.
Kurt Campbell, Clinton’s top adviser on Asia, told the Australian newspaper that Congress will approve the unpopular globalist pact in a lame-duck session later this year regardless of Clinton’s posturing.
Campbell served with Clinton in the State Department and is touted to become secretary of state if she wins election. He is the main author of the administration’s “pivot to Asia” policy, of which the TransPacific Partnership, TPP, is a major component.
Hillary Clinton touted the pact as the “gold standard” when she was secretary of state. But on the campaign trail she changed her stand under pressure from Bernie Sanders who, like Donald Trump, opposes TPP.
Trump stridently opposes the globalist pact and has challenged journalists to ask Clinton if she will withdraw from TPP on her first day in office as he has vowed to do.
Clinton now says she doesn’t support TPP “in its current form.”
Clinton’s rhetorical stance is a replay of Bill Clinton’s 1992 positioning on NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, and her own flip-flops on other trade pacts. Candidate Bill Clinton opposed NAFTA, but as president he made cosmetic changes to the pact, declared it fixed, and pushed it through Congress.
In her earlier presidential run, Hillary said she opposed the then-pending free trade agreements with Colombia and South Korea, declaring, “I will do everything I can to urge the Congress to reject the Colombia Free Trade Agreement.”
But emails from her private server as secretary of state reveal Clinton was personally lobbying Democrat members of Congress to support the Colombia deal, and she lobbied Congress to pass the South Korea free trade agreement as well.
The revelation from her adviser Kurt Camppbell that Clinton would not oppose a lame-duck vote on TPP is straight from Barack Obama’s 2008 playbook.
While campaigning in the fierce 2008 Ohio primary, Obama said the U.S. should withdraw from NAFTA if it could not be renegotiated. But at the same time, Obama’s top economic adviser, Austin Goolsbee, was telling Canadian officials that what Obama was saying was just campaign rhetoric, not a real policy plan.
The TPP has become a central issue in the 2016 presidential campaign. It is a sweeping 12-nation regulatory pact that empowers an international commission of unelected foreign bureaucrats to rule on everything from U.S. border controls to its food, drugs, energy and Internet.
If approved, TPP would lay the groundwork for entangling the U.S. in a Pacific Union akin to the European Union the voters of Great Britain just rejected. Like the European Union, TPP institutionalizes the free movement of people, goods and capital across borders.
Numerous surveys show Americans across the political spectrum oppose the TPP because it would send more jobs overseas and hurt Americans.
